How much Google Ads costs

The short answer

Google Ads has no price list. You set a daily budget, and on Search you pay for clicks at a price set by an auction every time someone searches. What a click costs depends mostly on what you sell. In our Keyword Planner data for the US, a typical top-of-page click runs from $1.41 for food & beverage searches to $239.69 for personal injury law. Half of the 33 industries we measure sit above $11.33.

A first budget is a sum: the clicks you want in a month times what a click costs in your industry.

How Google charges you

• You pay for clicks, not for being shown. On Search with cost-per-click bidding, the maximum bid is the most a click can cost you, and Google says you will often be charged less.
• The price of a click comes from the auction. Google charges the minimum needed to clear its Ad Rank thresholds and to beat the advertiser ranked below you. Ads above the search results face higher thresholds, so they usually cost more per click.
• A daily budget is an average. On a given day a campaign can spend up to twice its average daily budget. Over a month you are never charged more than 30.4 times the daily budget.

This page covers Search, where most of the cost questions come from. Shopping and Performance Max are also bought in an auction, but they are not keyword-led and our data does not cover them.

Cost per click by industry

The figures below are measured, not estimated: we read them from Google Keyword Planner through the Google Ads API, for a fixed set of commercial searches in each industry. Where an industry has its own statistics page, the name links to it, with the figures city by city.

Cost per click on Google Search by industry, US, 2026 Q4

Industry	Monthly searches	Top-of-page CPC	Typical click	Clicks per $1,000
Personal Injury Law	930,200	$74–$405	$239.69	4
Insurance	3,882,100	$30–$96	$62.85	16
HVAC	2,092,500	$14–$83	$48.55	21
Plumbing	2,111,300	$14–$81	$47.62	21
Water Damage Restoration	560,990	$13–$76	$44.35	23
Legal	2,665,500	$12–$69	$40.50	25
Roofing	996,400	$11–$61	$36.10	28
Technology & Software	576,020	$8–$50	$28.96	35
Financial Services	2,359,300	$10–$38	$23.74	42
Pest Control	1,509,800	$7–$37	$21.90	46
Construction	1,163,400	$5–$32	$18.66	54
Moving & Storage	2,332,100	$7–$29	$17.77	56
Accounting & Tax	460,240	$6–$28	$16.75	60
IT Services	489,130	$5–$22	$13.64	73
Dental	4,934,400	$4–$21	$12.70	79
Pool Construction	237,800	$3–$20	$11.75	85
Solar Installation	545,010	$2–$20	$11.33	88
Tutoring & Test Prep	425,500	$4–$16	$9.79	102
Landscaping	955,100	$3–$15	$9.24	108
Transportation & Logistics	285,590	$3–$15	$9.01	111
Cleaning Services	843,100	$3–$15	$8.81	114
Chiropractor	836,800	$3–$15	$8.77	114
Medspa	2,044,400	$2–$15	$8.48	118
Senior Services	1,926,900	$3–$13	$7.95	126
Veterinary	3,123,500	$3–$12	$7.34	136
Auto Body & Collision	1,010,800	$2–$11	$6.41	156
Healthcare	8,583,400	$2.05–$9.23	$5.64	177
Real Estate	1,704,680	$1.51–$9.02	$5.27	190
Automotive	4,585,600	$1.91–$7.74	$4.83	207
Hospitality	59,392,500	$1.36–$4.21	$2.79	358
Pool Supply	700,600	$0.63–$3.88	$2.26	442
Wedding Services	1,677,200	$0.83–$3.23	$2.03	493
Food & Beverage	119,323,480	$0.48–$2.34	$1.41	709

Source: Google Keyword Planner (Google Ads API), Google Search, US, English, Oct 2025 – Sep 2026; 2026 Q4 edition, collected on 2026-10-20. Monthly searches add up a fixed set of commercial searches per industry. Top-of-page CPC is Google's low and high top-of-page bid estimate, weighted by search volume. Typical click is the midpoint of that range. How we collect these figures.

How to read these figures

• It is a bid range, not a bill. Google describes the low end as roughly the 20th percentile and the high end as roughly the 80th percentile of what advertisers have paid to show at the top of the page. What you pay depends on your own ads, bids and competitors.
• The typical click is a planning figure. The midpoint of the range is a fair starting point for a budget, not a promise. Ads that show lower on the page, or on less contested searches, often cost less.
• Cities differ. The same searches cost more in some cities than in others. Our city pages and the statistics pages show the range for each city we measure.
• A cheap click is not the goal. What matters is what a customer costs: the cost per click divided by the share of clicks that turn into a sale or a lead you accept.

Working out a starting budget

Two numbers make the first estimate: how many clicks you want in a month, and the typical click in your industry. Take plumbing, where a typical top-of-page click is $47.62. As an example, 100 clicks a month cost 100 × $47.62 = $4,762, or about $157 as an average daily budget (the monthly figure divided by 30.4, Google's own ratio).

The same arithmetic works backwards. A budget of $3,000 a month, the top of our Start plan, buys about 63 clicks at that price in plumbing, and about 265 in an industry with a typical click of $11.33. The last column of the table gives the clicks per $1,000 for every industry.

To turn clicks into sales or leads you need one more number, your conversion rate, and it should come from your own site or account. The budget planner in our ROAS calculator takes the cost per click and the conversion rate and shows the clicks, conversions and cost per conversion a budget buys.

Outside the US

Our Keyword Planner figures cover the United States only. Advertisers in the UK and Europe can run the same check in their own Google Ads account: Keyword Planner shows the top-of-page bid range for any country and language, in the account's currency. The arithmetic above does not change.

What else a campaign costs

The ad budget goes to Google. If someone runs the account for you, there is also a management fee, and most accounts need conversion tracking set up before the budget is spent well. We explain how agencies charge, and what we charge in the US, the UK and Europe, in how much Google Ads management costs.